Stills

About

My friend Max and I speak about Joan Mitchell whenever we meet. She was a Hans Hofmann student a decade before we were, his best student I think in terms of getting what he had to say and making the concepts work for her. More than Hofmann himself she gives us paint in action, paint in flight, etc. Max says, “ She paints branches. I only see branches.” Mitchell herself said she always referred to nature (Hofmann said if artists don’t work from nature they fall into habits of composition and their work devolves to signatures) but then translates! transfigures, and the works become wild expositions of what paint can do and be.

People think I transgressed composing BLONDE COBRA but those weren’t transgressions, everything in it was true to Jack Smith, who he’d been. (Later he set a lawyer at me to stop screenings but this was after he became a famous jerk.) Listen, I would rename it JOAN MITCHELL: TRANSGRESSIONS except that people might think the transgressions were hers.

How could I have done this? to works I revere and that couldn’t be further from what I impose on them: photographic images of the real world.